Delhi High Court rules AI training falls under fair dealing exception in interim judgment for ANI Media Private Limited
The Delhi High Court issued an interim judgment regarding the legality of AI training, ruling that training a Large Language Model (LLM) falls under the fair dealing exception of the Indian Copyright Act. In the case of ANI Media Private Limited v. OpenAI OpCo LLC, the court held that because OpenAI holds the data in a closed space without public access, the process is considered 'private use.' This ruling potentially expands the corporate definition of 'private' to include industrial-scale data copying by corporations, which may deviate from the original legislative intent of protecting individual researchers. Chaitanya Kumar Verma noted that the judgment may be seen as the court assuming the role of Parliament by applying the 'doctrine of updating construction' to modern technology. The court also observed that while ANI Media Private Limited's content was freely available online, the fact that it was not protected by a paywall does not automatically grant a license to reproduce. The ruling creates a two-tier world where OpenAI pays for Western news content while taking Indian content for free, potentially devaluing Indian news assets.